


riches & wonders

by cortue



Category: Ocean's 8 (2018)
Genre: Backstory, F/F, First Meetings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:40:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28144743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cortue/pseuds/cortue
Summary: “Everyone assumed about Lou and Debbie being together. They always had; it seemed too obvious.” // Twenty years of Lou and Debbie’s partnership, from first meeting to after the movie.
Relationships: Lou Miller/Debbie Ocean
Comments: 25
Kudos: 66
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	riches & wonders

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Aderam](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aderam/gifts).



> * is used to indicate one of the three sentences of dialogue that were taken directly from the movie.
> 
> Thanks to Julia and Cassandra for being sounding boards and reading this over. Thanks to desmouliti0ns and leanmeanlizardqueen for some perspective on Australian English and spires-to-heaven for French translation. Any remaining mistakes and divergent spellings are my own. Oh, and thanks to spatz for encouraging me to do yuletide in the first place. I'm so glad I did :D

_‘and I want to go home, but I am home’_  
-Riches and Wonders by The Mountain Goats

-

Left to her own devices, Lou is not above the quick and easy con. When she’d met Debbie, she was keeping herself afloat by illegally subletting lofts in Gramercy and Chelsea to tourists and the kind of milquetoast dreamer from one of the forty-nine other nameless states in this country who thought Manhattan would solve all their problems. It rarely did. As far as she knew, she was just as addicted to nicotine as she’d been in Melbourne. A more ambitious version of herself might’ve seen Airbnb coming before it was a thing and done something about it, but that’s not really how she works. It was how Debbie worked, of course, but she’s always been far too bespoke to waste her time on something like that. 

They’d met in Chelsea, late enough in the 90’s that it was no longer recognizable to anyone who’d seen it a decade before. Lou hadn’t been looking for company, but there was something that drew her towards a woman at the bar. For one, this woman was wearing a black turtleneck in June, so she was either new in town or an art student after a day set up at one of the air-conditioned galleries popping up between 20th and 26th. New could mean someone looking for a place to stay, and one of the lofts Lou managed would be free soon. An art student could mean, well, anything depending on if Lou decided she might be interested in company after all.

Especially when the woman smirked at Lou before she could open her mouth, and said, “I’m not looking to buy anything, thanks.” It was a signal of recognition more than a dismissal, and it hit Lou like a double shot of espresso. Lou had something of an instinct for spotting people like her. Interesting people involved in interesting things. At the tender age of telling everyone she’s twenty-five for as long as she can still use it to get free entry into clubs, it could take her a moment to put her finger on what drew her in one direction over another. She hadn’t exactly been able to hone these kinds of skills as a seamstress’s daughter from Ivanhoe. Debbie had started young, of course, but Lou didn’t know that yet. She didn’t even know the woman’s name, as she leaned herself back against the bar with a respectful distance between them.

“Are you sure, because I’ve got this timeshare in the Hamptons I really need to get off my hands.” She signaled the bartender and ordered a ginger beer. 

“I hear it’s cooler up there,” the woman said, playing an interested party that didn’t want to look too eager. “I’ve already got a spot on a timeshare in the Keys, though. I’m not sure if this would be a good investment.”

“Of course,” Lou says, sighing dramatically. “Hope I find someone soon, though. I’ve already had to lower my ask a few times.” She doesn’t say anything else, even as the woman does a deliberately poor job at hiding some surreptitious glances thrown Lou’s way. 

Lou doesn’t miss that there’s some legitimate intent in the woman’s expression, even before she puts her drink down and starts running a finger along the rim. “It would have to be a really good price,” the woman pauses almost imperceptibly before continuing, “if I’m going to get into bed with a stranger.” 

Well, alright. For all that Lou enjoys her job, enjoys the game of it, she does appreciate directness. The woman is watching her openly now and Lou takes a pull of her beer. She knows what she looks like. Good enough that she can get away with grinning, leaning closer, and whispering, “It’s a steal.” 

The woman rolls her eyes. Lou feels pleased with herself. 

-

They spend the night at the loft, and the next. Possibly the one after that. Lou sufficiently loses track of time that she tries to order food at three am. Turns out her favorite dosa place is closed, but it’s Manhattan and she’s not picky. There’s always pizza, and pizza-like objects. She picks a direction and walks on faith until the promise of neon lights draws her in. While she’s waiting outside, avoiding a group of drunk bankers in the middle of a ritualistic bonding chant, she shares a cigarette with the odd man out. She’s feeling generous, limbs still silken and unwound.

When he tells her he’s in finance, which is obvious, she asks if he has any advice. She’s been hearing something about the banks possibly failing at the end of the millennium, but she pays as much attention to technology as she does to American geography. It’s not as if she has money to lose. Hell, she doesn’t even remove the tags from her clothing most of the time. 

“Pledge kappa alpha, not alpha kappa,” her new friend Kevin mutters, looking exhausted. He taps the side of his nose, jerking his head meaningfully towards the group inside. Again, this is obvious, but she keeps him in mind as someone who shares information easily. In a year, when Debbie decides they’re going to start selling Y2K insurance bonds, Lou knows just who to talk to about how to make them sound legitimate. For now, though, they part ways and Lou returns to the loft with much needed sustenance. 

“This isn’t food,” Debbie says.

Privately, Lou might be willing to admit that the contents of this box are more pizza-like object and less pizza. Still, it’s gotten too cold to go back out again, even wearing Debbie’s turtleneck, and a woman cannot live on pussy alone. She folds a slice in half and eats it, shrugging at Debbie’s horrified expression. “Could’ve fooled me.”

Debbie sighs and starts picking wilted spinach off her side of the pizza. There shouldn’t be anything endearing about fussing like one of Lou’s mother’s church friends at a rummage sale, trying to get every crocheted doily to lay perfectly flat. They’re young and in New York; they should be having sex against picture windows overlooking Central Park and eating breakfast with Audrey Hepburn. Lou decides to chalk up any endearment she may feel to low blood sugar and the last day or two she has spent marinating in their combined pheromones.

“So,” she says, after she’s eaten half the pizza and Debbie’s eaten a slice, “if you’re not interested in real estate opportunities, what are you here for?”

“Oh,” Debbie says, “that.” She’s not really trying for nonchalance, which is good because she’s failing utterly. “The family store was getting a little crowded. Thought I’d open up a franchise on the east coast.” 

She leans back, clearly forgetting any limited interest she had for the food in favor of savoring the reality she’s projected herself into. It’s this look that makes people work with her, even as an unknown grifter from Las Vegas. Her ability to sit in a knock off velvet desk chair that Lou picked up at Housing Works, and lounge like it had been personally gifted to her by Charles or Ray Eames, she can’t remember which.

There’s a moment when Lou has a real choice. When she is still the sharp, objective observer who knows a dangerous idea when she sees it. She’s doing well enough on her own and introducing a partner could make things complicated.

And then Debbie joins Lou back in reality long enough to smile at her and ask, “You busy?”

Lou smiles back, chin in hand, because what kind of idiot would look away. “Not when I can help it.”

-

They start with classic scams, the sort of thing anyone worthwhile could do in their sleep. Lou partially expected Debbie to be above selling Staten Island Ferry tickets to tourists that do not know it’s free, but Debbie turns out to be surprisingly unpretentious about fraud. Big or small, as long as she’s running something she can get her own hands in, she’s happy. More than happy, she’s alive.

“It’s practically our inheritance,” Debbie says, one day while they’re waiting in Battery Park for today’s batch of potential customers to stew in their frustration. Their guidebooks told them to arrive for the Liberty Ferry as early as possible, and yet here they are, regretting their leisurely hotel brunch. It’s hot, which means that people are more likely to jump at the chance of an alternative route to get their obligatory holiday pictures in, but also that Lou is sweating under her wig. Even people from Wiscon-hio or wherever are unlikely to believe that Lou is an American, native-born New Yorker, so she’s always the plant, loudly declaring she’s not going to wait in that bloody line. 

Lou gets that Debbie’s talking about the con itself, which is old as trying to sell the Brooklyn Bridge, but with significantly more staying power. The thing is that she has positioned herself – possibly intentionally, but Lou can never be one hundred percent sure – so that she’s aglow in the afternoon light reflecting off the Hudson and for a moment Lou can’t think of anything approaching a retort.

“Speaking of history,” Debbie says, apparently ignorant of her partner’s lapse in language competency, “my grandmother could make better fakes than these.” She waves the tickets that Lou printed out in her face. 

Lou snorts and looks back out at the river. “Your grandmother is a forger.”

“True,” Debbie says, and Lou doesn’t need to see her to know she’s making the proud little head shake and smile she does when she reflects on her upbringing. It wasn’t until she was in year three or four of primary school and doing a presentation on Santa Claus, history’s greatest cat burglar, that she got an inkling her home life was nonstandard.

Lou goes looking for someone to design better tickets and makes a new friend at Kinkos, a closeted twenty something from Woodside looking for enough money to buy some space from her very extended family. Marian becomes Lou’s go to when there’s design work to be done, even after she and Debbie move on from the Staten Island Ferry scam. As much as Lou enjoys fleecing tourists, there’s more money to be made in running a modified Melon Drop con on Fifth Avenue. 

-

It’s like that for years, one thing to the next. Lou picks the people and lets Debbie pick the jobs. She’s not too concerned about what they do, apart from a vague idea that she’s not going to steal from people who can’t afford it. Debbie doesn’t object to this. After all, people who can’t afford much don’t have a lot to steal. Also, Debbie knows that Lou is still paying over three American dollars a minute to call her mother on Christmas, Easter, and before every match of the Ashes. The arbitrary lines Lou draws around who she’s conning makes the rest of the lying she does on those phone calls feel, well, normal. It’s not like she didn’t lie to her mother in her teens, sneaking out of the house to meet other year ten girls for breathless walks along the Yarra River until they were alone, or impatient enough to tell themselves they were alone.

She has established herself comfortably enough in her thirties that she doesn’t have to look for surreptitious or alfresco company. Usually, Debbie gets them a suite somewhere and Lou doesn’t worry about how expensive the room service is. It’s not like Debbie is actually paying for it. Meanwhile, her mother thinks she spends the early aughts as a club manager for the kind of neon pounding dance hall she came to New York to find. The kind of place she made her ignominious start in crime, skimming off inflated bottle service charges. Of course, her mother doesn’t know anything about that, or the fact that she’s closer to buying her own club than she could’ve ever reasonably expected.

“I get it,” Debbie says, in the confident tone of someone who does not get it at all. “Your mom is like your Aunt Ida.”

Debbie has mentioned Aunt Ida occasionally, usually when she is summoned to one of the Ocean family reunions she insists on organizing. The woman may not have inherited the family bug, but she certainly has some talent in persuasion. Attendance is always high. Unbeknownst to her, the rest of her family uses the reunion as an opportunity to hold a light-fingered competition of sorts. Debbie had explained all the rules to her, once, but it was abysmally convoluted and Lou had floated blissfully above it, interrupted only by the stray thought of how exactly she’d ended up attached to such a fucking nerd. 

Except then Lou finds herself roped into going to one of these reunions herself. Had Debbie ever actually formally invited her? Doubtful. But these things just happen when Debbie is around, and Lou isn’t exactly complaining. She is a little busy snagging the driver’s seat to save herself from a six-hour trip upstate with Debbie’s soporific jazz or garbled indie nonsense on the stereo. As much as she considers herself a city animal at this point, there is part of her that revels at driving out into the country. It reminds her of the spontaneous holidays her mother would take her on, packed into a station wagon and driving up the coast of New South Wales until they had felt like stopping at some beach or national park. They had slept in the back of the wagon and woke to the clamor of rainbow lorikeets. Driving through the Catskills is nothing like, but with Debbie in the passenger seat complaining about Lou listening to Car Talk radio, it feels like home.

They arrive at Aunt Ida’s within minutes of Debbie’s projected time, after stopping in what felt like every interstate oasis in the last three hundred and fifty miles. Debbie bought Lou no less than three decoy wallets and insisted on exactly where she had to keep them. Lou is an only child, but she recognizes the mania of sibling rivalry when she sees it. Sure enough, as soon as they arrive, they are approached by a man with Debbie’s sharp eyes. He introduces himself to Lou as Debbie’s half-brother. 

“Not the talented half,” Debbie clarifies.

Lou gives the two of them a wide berth to work out whatever subconscious trauma grew from sharing their mother’s love. It does not take her long to figure out that stability will not be found anywhere in this house. Part of her has always thought Debbie’s insistence that her whole family is just like that was an exaggeration, but after having to end every conversation with a request for her wallet back she escapes to the kitchen and found Aunt Ida herself, putting the finishing touches on new table centerpieces for dinner that would make Martha Stewart froth at the mouth. The comparison, even given as an offhand compliment, does not go over well. Aunt Ida’s withering opinion of that woman is clear – not for insider trading, but for getting caught so easily. No matter what else she’s decided to do with her life and how abnormal her extended family finds her, she’s still one of them.

So, Lou’s a little distracted for the better part of the weekend. She can be forgiven for not noticing a few things, like how they didn’t talk about a job the whole time. She is not counting whatever Debbie and Danny tried to pull on each other, because she needs to act believably old enough to to drive them back to the city. 

It’s not like she and Debbie never spent time socially, but there was usually some secondary point to it. Lou considers this until she doesn’t have to anymore, thankfully, because they’re back on the road towards the city. They stop for lunch and Lou doesn’t waste time steering the conversation.

“My mother is not Aunt Ida,” she says. Their pierogis arrive and she sighs as Debbie steals her sour cream, though she does not actually like the stuff. It’s more to let Debbie think she’s gotten something over Lou, so she won’t go for the sautéed onions that Lou actually wants to keep to herself. “You do understand that not everyone has to be thief or thief adjacent?”

“Of course not,” Debbie says, pleased with herself in a hungry, keen way that hints at further trouble. “If they were it would be more difficult.” Her fork hovers close to Lou’s plate again and Lou gives her a look. She spears one of her own pierogis instead and grins, fully satisfied. “Thought so.”

“You’re impossible,” Lou says, without heat. 

Debbie, of course, only takes this as compliment. “Oh honey,” she coos, “this is a family establishment.”

-

Lou isn’t a workaholic like everyone else in this country. Not once the money has been coming in regularly for a while and she can afford to take weeks off between jobs. After years of comparison shopping and a weekend as a wine heiress from Barossa Valley, she remembers she’s not Debbie and buys the first bike that feels right. She takes it north until she feels like stopping. Upstate New York can be beautiful in its own way, but it doesn’t really scratch the itch. She misses the Pacific, her first ocean.

Debbie stays in the city, set up like she’s always been there. She takes breaks in the same way a stock broker might disappear for twenty minutes to snort a few lines, emerging from bathrooms with a manic look in their eyes. She’s either working a job or laying out the ground work for the next. She doesn’t push her luck enough to try and rope Lou into them all, but they’re always together for the big stuff, the art pieces. 

“It doesn’t work without you,” Debbie will say, like it’s enough, and it is. A simple hook is best.

Lou’s not saying she isn’t interested. She does love her job, after all, but it’s just a job. A means to get her from one place to the next. No different, in the end, than making it work as a scholarship student with the in crowd at Ivanhoe Girl’s Grammar School by being poor enough to be interesting, but picking up enough of a cultivated accent to be safe. She thinks about all the years it took her to save for a plane ticket out of there and now here she is, raking it in by running a wire con out of a sports bar near Penn Station. At this rate, she can see herself having enough money that she never has to roll her sleeves up again unless she’s looking to show off. Except it’s not about the money anymore. It’s about Debbie, and how Lou can’t imagine her doing anything else. And so, Lou makes plans of her own, but she doesn’t buy tickets. When Debbie ropes her in on something, there isn’t anything major in her life that needs to be rearranged.

At this point, Lou has been in New York for over half her life. More of her time than she’d like to admit is spent thinking about not looking old. She quits smoking three separate times and starts getting her roots dyed regularly. In late December, she decides she needs a break from the constant scrutiny of a hungry city. She mentions over dinner one night that she’s going to spend New Year’s Eve at Niagrara Falls and isn’t surprised when Debbie shows up at the rental car place three days later. If she hadn’t wanted company, she would have taken her bike. 

The only thing that might change Debbie’s mind is: “I had to make the reservations late,” Lou warns. “It’s just the Country Inn for us, this time.”

Debbie snorts and rolls her eyes. “You didn’t actually make reservations.” It’s mostly a statement, with just a hint of uncertainty at the end. When Lou doesn’t add anything, she looks incredulous. “Lou, if you didn’t think you could arrange a nicer room, I could’ve.” 

“You could?” Lou asks, in friendly sarcasm. “I must’ve forgotten.” She decides to head the conversation off before Debbie can find some way to make them hotel owners for the night, staying at the most expensive suite she can find. “I didn’t have to _arrange_ one, so I didn’t.” Debbie clearly doesn’t understand. “It’s a vacation.” The message is still not getting through. Lou sighs. “I don’t want to steal anything on this trip.”

“Oh,” Debbie says. That keeps her silent for a good minute. “Not even a little?”

Lou laughs, despite herself. “No. That going to be a problem?”

Debbie shakes her head. “Just here to relax,” she says and holds up three fingers in a scout salute. She had explained it to Lou once, which led to the story of how she’d been in the girl scouts for a few years. Her mother had signed her up for practice in sales and expected her to exceed any cookie selling target the troop gave her. Apparently, there’s still a scholarship with her name on it back in Nevada.

Once they cross the border, they split up for a few hours. Lou goes for a walk to look at the falls themselves. Debbie apparently finds a high stakes poker game and shows back up at their room with a bottle of Château Lafite and a Cartier watch. Poker isn’t exactly Debbie’s game, but she’s still an Ocean. There’s a chance she won all that without even cheating – much.

They open the wine on New Year’s Eve itself, naked in the light of the fireworks. “Start as you mean to continue,” Debbie says, drinking from the bottle. She says it every year, the closest she gets to superstitious. 

Lou kisses her, and drinks wine that tastes like a warm day spent among lilacs. Things are good. She’s happy in a simple, wordless way that makes her feel timeless. She agrees to whatever Debbie is planning for the next few months without asking too many questions. 

And then they hit what Debbie calls a bit of a rough patch and the rest of the world refers to as a major global recession.

-

Turns out, a stable economy was the linchpin of confidence in several schemes Debbie had arranged in the immediate past. All it took was one very dissatisfied buyer of some fake Degas sketches to have some very dangerous connections that Debbie hadn’t anticipated, and New York was no longer safe for them. Lou would like to blame this on Debbie not researching the people involved in all her solo jobs thoroughly enough, but it was basically impossible to track every second cousin’s friend’s girlfriend’s brother who worked as an enforcer, even with Facebook.

Avoidable or not, the truth remains that Lou escaped New York with very little that she hadn’t brought in decades ago. The club is gone, already collapsed when her legitimate investors backed out. Her savings are burnt, partly from the club and partly from a very substantial bribe that got them out of the city in the first place. Every mile Lou spent driving on 95 north that night was like its own claustrophobic eternity, her breath catching at the shine of every headlight behind them. All so they could end up staying in a cheery bed and breakfast. Unironically. In fucking Trumbull, Connecticut. A scant two months ago, someone would’ve had to pay her a substantial amount of money to even acknowledge Trumbull, Connecticut existed. 

Debbie is no help. She hasn’t said anything since Lou shoved her into the back seat and threw a blanket over her. It was the only way to get her out of the city. Debbie doesn’t know how to walk away and she definitely doesn’t know how to lose. Lou puts up with her silent treatment for the time it takes to unload the car and shade all the windows. She can barely remember what she bought at the gas station for them to eat. She definitely can’t remember a time she’s ever felt so tight in her skin, sweat, and nerves. She couldn’t be farther from sleep, but she sits on the bed. It’s likely she’ll want to be sitting for this next part.

When she looks over, Debbie is sitting at the side table with a discolored plastic tablecloth laid over musty chintz like she’s waiting for her tasting menu to arrive at Per Se. Debbie doesn’t need any practice to keep her body relaxed in a tense situation. Growing up with a brother that compared everything to poker and insisted ‘everyone has a tell’ must’ve done a real number on her at the right age, because she has perfect control. Lou’s never seen her grow too still, become too animated, repeat or avoid any particular motions that anyone might notice. It must’ve taken her years to hone that kind of perfection. Pity for her, that as far as Lou is concerned, she’s an open book. She will have finished perfecting her pitch, right about now.

Debbie looks back at Lou and raises a single eyebrow. “Am I allowed to speak?” she asks, as if she has any right to pique. Lou opens her hands in resignation. 

“A year and a half,” Debbie says. She is waiting for Lou to ask her what happens in a year and a half, but when Lou doesn’t, she isn’t fazed. “Maybe just one year, depending.” 

“Depending on what?” Lou asks. She really can’t help herself. 

“How fast you can learn French.” Debbie smiles like nothing has changed, like nothing can stop her. She’s off in whatever reality she’s rebuilding around herself and Lou’s here, alone at the end of this shitty night. The exhaustion rips through her, leaving her laid out on the bed. She’s still fully dressed, but she can’t imagine having the energy to change that. 

“Tu sais quoi, vas te faire foutre.1” It’s a lot harsher than she had intended, but it’s not completely empty of intent. She knows what Debbie’s childhood was like. Nights like this weren’t unheard of. Sometimes one or both of her parents would end up in jail. She and her brother were sent to some aunt or cousin without a moment’s notice, and told they were to perfect some skill or another. Like an apprenticeship, Debbie would say, and shrug off any further questions. Lou’s upbringing wasn’t anything like that. Her mother had always been a hardworking constant in her life. Her father had just left, like the completely average deadbeat he was. He hadn’t even come back, to make her relive it all.

She drifts in the silence, expecting Debbie to come back with some retort. She is considering just pretending to be asleep, but it’s possible she actually is asleep. Her awareness is skipping ahead like a dream. She kicks in surprise when she feels a tugging on her leg, but realizes that Debbie is taking her boots off. She doesn’t resist when Debbie picks one arm up and then the other, removing her watch and rings. She has no memory of how she ended up under the covers but suddenly Debbie’s bony finger is poking into her shoulder, nudging her to move over. It’s a twin bed. There’s barely room. Lou rolls to one side and Debbie gets in behind her.

“I’ll fix it, Lou,” Debbie says. “One year.”

Lou can wait a year.

-

In six months, they’ve made enough peace and paid enough restitution that they can move to New Jersey. Lou has a tidy operation rigging Bingo, because they need money for groceries. Debbie isn’t impressed, but she’s not offering any alternatives. Lou’s annoyance at Debbie’s sudden lassitude is getting loud enough that she’s ready to say something. It turns out to be completely unnecessary.

One day, Debbie runs up the three flights of stairs to their apartment. The grin is back, and it only ever means one thing. There’s a job she cares about. She hands Lou a flier for an art gallery and explains about the art buying scheme she’s cooked up. She’s clearly excited, but Lou assumes she hasn’t suddenly lost the ability to read a map.

“This is in Manhattan,” Lou says. Things may have been smoothed over quicker than they originally expected, but that didn’t mean they were completely in the clear. They had discussed it, and agreed that they would go back when they were both ready. At least, Lou had agreed. 

“So?” Debbie waves a hand dismissively. “We’re ready.”

It’s not a question. Lou pushes her knuckles against her mouth and wonders what the fuck she’s doing here. She and Debbie are sitting at the same table, but Lou is clearly alone again. Maybe she always was.

“I’m not your pet,” Lou warns, finally. “I’m not here to jump before you even tell me how high.”

“Poetic,” Debbie says, easily. She was convinced most higher education was a scam, and didn’t hesitate to refer to the year Lou spent at uni studying comparative literature whenever she thought she could get away with it. Now wasn’t really one of those times.

“I’m not joking,” Lou says. “Don’t just assume I’m coming with you.” Part of her feels like she’s over reacting, and part of her thinks this is long overdue. She doesn’t actually think that Debbie is going to walk out of here without a plan to deescalate whatever resentment is still lingering against them in the city, but that’s not the point. The truth is that Lou was never the intended target of any of it. She might’ve dodged this whole thing and let Debbie figure her mess out on her own, but she’d never even considered it. Lou has never been unwilling to follow Debbie, but she would appreciate being _asked_ some of the time. 

_At least pretend we’re equal in this_ , she thinks.

Debbie looks at Lou like she doesn’t recognize her. 

“I’m going,” she says. She clearly can’t understand why she even has to say it. “I’m not wasting myself here any longer.” Lou knows what she means. She’s always needed something bigger, some grander stage upon which to prove herself capable.

Lou lays her hands out on their table, staring at the grain between her fingers. It was a curbside find. Some antique style Debbie liked and Lou didn’t recognize. She was certainly familiar with it now, after she’d sweated it up the stairs one landing at a time. They moved into this apartment two months ago, and Lou hadn’t picked it out with any thought to how difficult it would be to furnish a two-bedroom on the third floor. She expected that they wouldn’t be here long enough to bother. 

They’ve never actually lived together before. There was never any reason. They were always on the move and they had the money to sleep wherever they wanted. Lou knew that Debbie had kept an apartment in the city, before, but she had always associated her with hotel rooms. Classy ones, sure, but still transient. And so, it had come as something of a surprise that Debbie had strong opinions on throw rugs and wood accents and whether or not Lou could buy sale bin movies produced after the moon landing and leave them out on the coffee table. Lou will watch anything with a car chase, and Debbie has given up on objecting to them verbally. She’ll still take her contacts out in silent protest and lie on the couch with her feet in Lou’s face. The only way to get her to stop was to threaten to order take-out from one of her less preferred options.

But sure, wasting herself.

“Well,” Lou says, standing up from the table to see herself out, “if you’re sure.” 

-

Lou goes home, eventually. Or, she tries to. 

There’s only so many brunches she can have with her mother per month, and so Melbourne is too close. She tries Sydney, tries to find comfort in slipping into aloof anonymity. Of course, if that had any hope of working, she wouldn’t have moved to New York in the first place. There’s no place on this bloody continent that her mother doesn’t know someone who knows someone and wouldn’t Lou like to meet them for lunch, maybe? She wonders if that’s where she gets her particular gifts from, but it’s not much of a consolation prize when she’s halfway through her forties and still trying to weasel out of these conversations with her mother.

She’s too old for this, too sore. “I’ll meet him,” she says. She finds herself scratching the same old place on her wrist she used to worry at whenever she actually minded telling some lie. She can always cancel, when she gets his phone number.

“Who?” her mother asks. The whirring of the sewing machine in the background cuts off. She was never the sort to do one thing at a time.

“Him,” Lou repeats. She hadn’t been paying close enough attention to guess at a name. “Him, whoever you were talking about.”

“Ah, that’s how it is,” her mother says. “Ignoring me?” The sewing machine starts up again. It’s the same machine she’s had for Lou’s entire life, her closest companion and the translator of her moods. Right now, it’s audibly struggling, like her mother is pushing the fabric through it faster than it would like. “Well, it’d serve you right if I did find some bloke instead, but I’ve already told Clara you’ll meet her daughter for coffee.”

Lou tries to sit down, forgetting there is no chair behind her. She catches herself on the wall before falling over completely, letting out a soft grunt at the impact. Debbie had said the heel on these boots was a little too dramatic, when Lou had bought them. She’s not thinking about Debbie. She opens her mouth and doesn’t know what to say.

“Loula? You there?” Her mother sounds a little less annoyed and more concerned, enough to actually bring out that old nickname.

This doesn’t have to be a moment. She could just agree to some coffee and move on. That’s much more her style, to not care too much. Stay above everything and wait to see what comes her way. It works wonders, always has. But it is a little less satisfying to get what comes for free, when there’s something more specific she wants.

“Were you going to tell me you knew?” she asks. She has the sense to sit down at her table, which is covered in headshots waiting to be added to fake dating profiles. If she’s currently making a lot of her money running romance scams on adulterous men, well, maybe she’s working through something.

“Were you?” her mother asks right back. She’s never had patience for bullshit – her own, or anyone else’s. The weekend after her husband left, she’d sat down and modified costumes for the Melbourne Civic Theater for two days straight. Lou had stayed in her bedroom until her mother dragged her out and told her she’d be working under the stage manager that year, to give her something to do. That was that. 

“I thought about it,” Lou says. She’s not going to spin it as something that ‘never came up’. She’d made sure it never came up. It had seemed necessary, and then expected, and then habit. It wasn’t exactly comfortable, it was just how things were. Sometimes change was worse.

She might be thinking of Debbie after all. Not just all the times she could have brought Debbie up to her mother and didn’t, reluctant to pin down exactly what it was they were doing. But also, all the times she had just let Debbie have her way instead of saying anything. Until Debbie, already very comfortable getting her own way, moved ahead on everything with such speed that Lou wasn’t sure she would listen if Lou did say anything. Maybe there’s a pattern there, when she thinks of it like that.

“Well?” her mother asks. It was her way of opening the floor to see if Lou needed to say anything. Lou is going to start suspecting her of some self-help fad, at this rate. Or worse, pamphlets. She pictures her mother researching what to say to a lesbian daughter and knows suddenly, as if she had never doubted it, that her mother would forge ahead and repeat all of it, word for word. Thorough. Too thorough, probably. 

Knowing is enough. It’s more, actually, than she thought it would be. She’s possibly experiencing symptoms of early menopause creeping in, from how oddly warm she feels. 

She opens her mouth and means to change the subject, possibly to agree to coffee. This conversation is entirely too revelatory for her to be left alone in her apartment afterwards, and it can only get worse.

“So,” Lou says, “what gave me away?”

-

It’s one thing for her mother to have always known Lou was a ‘sporty type’, as she puts it. It’s another to realize her mother thinks of Lou as a bad liar. Admittedly, claiming she was out to meet Aira for that many language tutoring sessions when her grades never improved wasn’t her best work. Still, it’s funny, in a detached sort of way, and, she can’t help thinking, it was probably better like this. People who expect others to know how clever they are tend to get caught, eventually.

They talk until it gets dark. Until her father comes up. Her mother is quiet for long enough that Lou notices the lack of background noise. She had stopped sewing a while ago. When she ultimately begs off to make dinner, Lou doesn’t blame her. They have to walk before they can run, and all that. 

Lou sits in the dark room and she doesn’t bother turning on the light. She aches, more than she’d like. No matter what she’s doing and how she feels beforehand, nights tend to smother her in possibility. She could do anything, but left to her own devices, it’s an ordeal just to get up. 

Eventually, she’ll have to move. There’s no one here to make decisions for her, or tell her she’s been brooding for too long. Which is a rich thing to be accused of from – some people. 

The way she sees it, she’s only ever really made one kind of decision. The kind where she’s had enough of one thing and it’s time to move to the next. She had felt itchy and tired of how complicated things had become in New York, and thought spending some time in her own skin would solve it. The problem is, she can’t say for certain what that means to her anymore. 

The people she knew in New York were mostly contacts. Not the sort of people who she’d bother to tell her anecdotes to, like how she’d spent all her spare time in uni lying her way into some concert or another. For years, getting lost in music was the only thing that made sense to her, but she didn’t have the money for so many shows. Once she had found a way around that, she didn’t have the time to write her essays. So, she started stealing for the music, and cheating to pass her courses, and finally realized she could cut out the latter and move somewhere she could really focus on the former. 

“You can’t tell anyone that,” Debbie had insisted, when she heard the whole story. “No one will take you seriously if they find out you’re also a groupie for AC/DC.” Lou had laughed at how she had over-enunciated each letter. Honestly, it had been a miracle Debbie could even recognize such a relevant cultural icon, be it several decades too late. For the next few weeks, whenever she was being particularly snobbish and Lou didn’t feel like deescalating the situation in a measured fashion, she would push Debbie to say ‘AC/DC’ again until they had forgotten what they were almost arguing about.

Lou hadn’t shifted herself an entire hemisphere just to stare at her front door like Debbie might let herself in at any moment. The impulse had followed her anyway. Moving to Sydney should have felt like coming home, but it doesn’t. The people here that think they know her can’t imagine anything about her new life, like how she buys burner phones in bulk and hands them out to pick pockets she might need to get a hold of. Honestly, no one can truly appreciate the work that goes into keeping a network of pick pockets active if they haven’t put in the legwork, and that includes Debbie. 

For pretty much everything else, though, it’s Debbie. Debbie who knows who she was before she moved to New York and who she became after, and what she’s like when she’s not trying to be anything in particular. It didn’t fix things, but it wasn’t nothing. It was worth kicking off her boots and standing up, walking down the hallway to her bedroom and fishing out the shoebox under her bed where she has been keeping the unopened letters she received with American postage. She had never given out her new address to anyone, but that didn’t mean she was surprised when she started receiving them. 

Debbie knew Lou better than anyone, and she was pretty sure that went both ways, but it didn’t take a genius to know that it was better to avoid listening to a grifter unless you were willing to part with something. She had been sure, as soon as she saw the postmark on the letters, that Debbie would know what to say to change her mind and get her to come back, even if Lou didn’t know what that might be herself. 

There’s also the chance that Debbie is just writing an old friend. That she doesn’t care if Lou comes back or not. If she’s going to do this, she has to be ready for either possibility.

Lou opens one letter, and then another. She doesn’t read them in any particular order, and so one might refer back to something in a previous letter that she hasn’t seen yet. That’s not the point. The point is that none of them make any sense. Debbie is talking like a completely different person, mentioning things that didn’t happen. Lou reads through the whole box and then works her way through the pile of mail by her door, the one that no one is stopping her from ignoring for months and months.

There’s a single postcard in there, patiently waiting. It’s a vintage photo of Niagara Falls, showing the suspension bridge by the Whirlpool Falls. There’s no writing on the back. Lou has to get her reading glasses and peer at the thing under a direct light before she notices that there are words hidden in black ink among the bridge supports.

_‘All Over Again’_

-

“Took you long enough,” Debbie says. It’s been years, and Lou should be noticing the ways that she has changed. The reality is that she looks so much like _her_ that it almost hurts to look for too long. Lou can’t notice anything else. 

This doesn’t change the fact that she’s also more than a little annoyed, but that’s nothing new. She pulls out the book she brought and carefully lays it out on the table between them. No sudden movements.

“Cute,” Lou says, gesturing at the book.

Debbie picks it up and reads from the marked page of Niagara Falls All Over Again by Elizabeth McCracken. “‘I needed a partner,’ he recalls. ‘I had always needed a partner.’” She tilts the book down in her hands so that she’s looking at Lou over the spine. “Do you disagree?”

“You might want to actually read it before trying to be clever,” Lou warns. She’s not here to be charmed quite that easily. Not after Debbie made her hunt for the answer to her message and find it in some quote hidden between three hundred pages of American contemporary fiction. “Things don’t go well.”

Debbie appears to consider that for a moment, and then puts the book down. She gestures both her hands open, as if to indicate her circumstances. It’s not like her to concede to reality, but sometimes reality doesn’t leave much choice. There’s nothing she can say to change the orange jumpsuit she’s wearing, or the room full of guards. She’s got plans to ingratiate herself, Lou is sure, but they’re still here. And so is Debbie. 

Lou feels a lot of the annoyance go out of her all at once, replaced by the clenching worry that had taken up residence in her lungs when she had noticed the postmarks on Debbie’s letters more clearly. She had tried calling all of Debbie’s numbers, first, and when there was no one to answer them, she reached out to her other contacts. When she had confirmed where Debbie was, she had gotten on a red-eye the next day.

“What happened?” she asks.

“I made the wrong call,” Debbie says. Her tone is falsely light, as if she’s reporting on some mildly interesting gossip she overheard on the subway. Lou doesn’t miss that her breathing becomes deliberately measured after speaking. She drums her fingers on the table by the book a few times, and then any signs of how furious she is vanish. 

“Did you read my letters?” Debbie asks. Not _‘did you get them?’_ She had never doubted her ability to send them, and was likely already making progress on a workaround to avoid anyone else in the prison reading them.

Lou is all for that. It would save her hours spent cracking a coded list of possible delivery routes and requested supplies. _You could have just called me_ , she wants to point out. _You could have asked me without this spy movie bullshit._ But of course she couldn’t. That’s not how Debbie operates. 

Lou had some time to reflect on this truth, the last few years, and eventually she came back around to thinking about her fortieth birthday. She hadn’t told anyone the date, and so had sailed comfortably through her day without a single reference from anyone after her mother’s unavoidably early phone call. She had thought that if Debbie knew, surely she wouldn’t have given up the opportunity to make some ‘over the hill’ jokes. It didn’t matter that Debbie was older. As she liked to say, _‘you’re only as old as your ID.’_

On the way back home, Lou had considered if she wanted to call Debbie after all and invite her over. There hadn’t been a reason to keep information like her birthday away from Debbie, but it just never seemed to come up. It wasn’t like they were trading horoscopes. Except, she had turned on her kitchen light and found Debbie already sitting there, with a single sad cupcake and a sparkler. Somehow, she hadn’t even seemed too dazed by the sudden brightness of the room.

Instead, she’d just looked up at Lou with that smirk that wasn’t satisfied just with being right. Debbie positively dared people not to be impressed with her. Lou had laughed a little and taken her time removing her coat and throwing the mail down in some corner, to be discovered weeks later. 

“You could have asked,” Lou had pointed out.

“Oceans don’t ask,” Debbie had said, reflexively. As if she were repeating something she’d heard her whole life. Lou had no doubt that is exactly what it was, and also that she didn’t want to know. But she had still tilted her head forward, raising her eyebrows, and silently asked for more until Debbie added, “Oceans decide what they want and figure out how to get it. It’s the only way to be sure.”

Lou had sat in the silence that sometimes came on her when she tripped over one of these revelations. Finally, she asked, “You realize how that sounds, right?” 

Debbie had shrugged, but there was something guarded about her expression. Even after she had changed the subject and the evening had dissolved into better things, like sugar in the mouth, Lou had still seen it. 

It’s the same expression Debbie has now, the closest Lou has ever seen to uncertainty on her face. This Claude Becker really did a number on her. Lou knows not to ask about it, since she’ll get nothing from Debbie where people can see her.

Instead, she nods and says, “I read them.” 

Debbie nods back, and looks a little more like herself. She’s still watching Lou a little warily and in other circumstances, Lou might make her wait for an answer. She might even demand that Debbie outright ask for her help. But as things are, it’s not actually a great feeling to see Debbie like this. Not after she went through all the trouble to make a scavenger hunt about the whole thing. Lou can admit it’s the best way to get her to go anywhere – give her enough information that she starts moving towards more. 

“It’ll take me a few weeks,” Lou says. Everything she left behind here has gone stale. Amita is the only one Lou knows who’s still active in the city, and smuggling cigarettes into prison is decidedly out of her wheelhouse.

Debbie nods. She opens her mouth and fails to say something. “You’re getting slow, Miller,” is what comes out on the second try.

“Yeah, well,” Lou shrugs and wishes she could hold her. It’s not the sort of feeling she can do anything about, so she doesn’t bother. “Jetlag’s a bitch.”

-

It’s several months before Debbie gets a secure line out of the prison to call Lou, and it’s not the sort of thing they can rely on often. She doesn’t give Lou any chance to ask about Claude Becker. 

“I am going to need a team,” Debbie says, as soon as Lou picks up the phone.

Lou snorts, and idly scratches her hairline. “Got anyone in mind to put it together?”

“Lou,” Debbie says. She’s sure to be rolling her eyes with that pinched face look she gets when Lou refuses to be swept along by her current.

“Debbie,” Lou says. She’s not expecting miracles, but she has no intention of letting things be exactly how they were before. 

Debbie sighs. “I would like it to be you,” she admits, sourly. 

Lou would like to say something trite like _‘now was that so hard?’_ but she knows that it actually was. She rewards her instead with a simple, “I can look at my schedule. When were you thinking?”

“Five years,” Debbie says. “At least.” 

She is entirely clinical about it, bypassing the fact that it hits Lou like ice water. In the midst of everything else, it’s clear Lou hasn’t really dealt with the truth of it yet.

Five years. 

“If I’m doing this,” Lou says, shaking everything else off to fall back on the familiar.

“If,” Debbie says, like the word doesn’t mean what it actually means.

“You need to tell me things,” Lou insists.

“I need to tell you things,” Debbie repeats, slowly. “Like – my lucky numbers? Which 90’s sitcom I want them to reboot next? Those kind of things?”

Lou is not falling for the bait of pointing out that Debbie would like no 90’s sitcoms to be rebooted. She didn’t want them to exist in the first place. “Debbie.”

“Lou,” Debbie says. When Lou stays silent, she sighs. “I can’t tell you what I don’t know. The details are still coming together.”

Lou believes at least part of that statement. “Fine,” she says. “When you know, you tell me. Then I decide if I’m interested.”

“Sure,” Debbie agrees, far too easily, and changes the subject to what she needs in the next shipment. Eventually, there’s the sound of a door opening and she has to leave the conversation as abruptly as she started it. 

Lou looks down at her phone, the date glowing back up at her. Five years. 

Better get to work.

-

Lou did not just wake up one morning with the ability to put a crew together. It’s partly instinct, partly experience, and partly things like keeping tabs on certain Pintrest pages. When Tammy pins ten smoothie recipes in a row, that’s a sign that she’s open to move a few things for interested parties with minimal protestations. Even when Lou’s not looking to move things for herself, it’s important she keep up her reputation of knowing who does what, and where, and when. 

So, she keeps her ears open. She walks the streets of Queens with her eyes on the hands of the up-and-comers, and endures being treated like a dinosaur by anyone with their own VPN. It’s worth it, once she sees a piece in the Times about Claude Becker. Apparently, despite his wealth, he considers himself a real New Yorker and takes the R train like everyone else. Lou has never considered herself a particularly vindictive person, but maybe it just depends. Maybe, for some people, she’ll make an exception. She lets it be known that she’ll pay good rates for anyone that happens to find anything of his on the subway. A wallet, a watch, a credit card number. She’s not picky.

By winter, he’s shelling out for private rides wherever he goes, and Lou thinks: good. This city belongs to a lot of people, but it should never be welcoming to him. 

She doesn’t tell Debbie, because Debbie still hasn’t said anything about what happened. Debbie has plenty to say on other subjects, mainly business. The coded letters keep coming and Lou doesn’t miss the fact that the books Debbie is picking had once lived on her old uni syllabi. The sorts of books she always said she would get back to reading someday, but then picked up some magazine instead. Lou is pretty sure these letters aren’t getting checked anymore, and so the code is entirely for Debbie’s own amusement. As is the fact that she ends them all with the coded reminder to ‘burn after reading’.

Lou might roll her eyes, but it’s good to see some consistent signs of life. She has been around Debbie planning something before, but it’s never taken this long. They’ll be talking, maybe comfortably enough that Lou can forget where she’s come to visit her, and then Debbie will trail off and look into the distance for a good minute. Even after Lou snaps her out of it, she’s distant, and clearly impatient to get back to whatever thought had distracted her. She still won’t tell Lou anything about the plan.

Five years is a long time, but so is the fifteen that came before. Loyalty means something to Lou. She’s not leaving just because things are difficult. 

Lou keeps herself busy, in her own way. Some people might insist on the biggest grab for wealth that they can imagine, but Lou is perfectly happy to make money the patient, dependable way: skimming off the top. She’s running a club again, and making enough on the side that she lives comfortably in the kind of oversized loft she used to see in movies. The owners have hinted they might bring her on as a partner, after she proves how consistently she can fill the place to the gills. It’s not exactly her plan anymore, though. The thing is, and she’s never telling Debbie this, but there are nights when it just feels a little too easy. She might need one of the kids she hired fresh out of a masters in design to explain their social media presence to her, but it’s nothing new really. Convince people that someone else, somewhere else, is having a much better time than they are. Then charge them to join in. If it doesn’t feel like they hoped it would, then maybe it will after a few shots. 

She could do this in her sleep, and some days she’s not sure whether or not that might be happening. Time moves strangely. She remembers the day that Amita had called her to vent about her younger sister’s wedding, but no specifics about the months leading up to the actual week of. Suddenly she’s at Prisha’s mehndi party. Well, technically, she’s on the rooftop several floors above Prisha’s mehndi party, holding the vape pen for Amita so that she doesn’t smudge the drying designs on her hands. Her original plans had involved taking Amita out for karaoke at some point to take her mind off it, but apparently Amita wants to talk.

“Why does everyone else have this figured out so easily? Prisha went on three dates, and boom. Husband material.” Amita sighs. “I don’t want to date. I just want a mate. You know, from – never mind. Anyway, I don’t understand why I can’t just meet someone and,” she gestures some indistinct shape in the air, “have it all work out.”

Lou wonders vaguely if they might be something like friends. She can’t imagine herself breathing in this awful vanilla smoke for just anyone. But it’s not like they exactly know each other that well, beyond Lou being willing to vouch for Amita following whatever timeline she commits to for a job. She’s a little old to wonder what exactly a friend is, if not a dependable person you’ll spend time with willingly. Thankfully, Amita has to know that Lou is not the person to come to for extensive sympathy. She probably just wants someone to listen. 

“Tinder?” Lou asks, to get the ball rolling.

Amita sighs. “I tried to set up a profile. Immediately regretted it. Do you know what it’s like to date men these days?”

Lou does not laugh, or at least not too much. “Can’t help with blokes, sorry.” She shrugs and is absolutely, distinctly not sorry. She wouldn’t put up with the general male population for world fucking peace.

“Right,” Amita says. “I wasn’t sure, apart from you know, Debbie. I didn’t want to assume.” 

Lou appreciates the intention, even if the sentiment doesn’t matter much to her. Everyone assumed about Lou and Debbie being together. They always had; it seemed too obvious. They weren’t wrong then, but these days they weren’t exactly right either. It wasn’t like they’d had any chance to deal with it, and Lou expected they wouldn’t anytime soon. She wasn’t looking for handholding and rose petals, but possibly — a single honest conversation? Not a ridiculous thing to ask for, she thought.

“What’s it like, being with someone for that long?” Amita asks and Lou realizes she’s been staring into space. 

Apparently, she’s feeling reflective, because she says, “It’s like doing anything for a long time. You forget how to do everything else.”

A door opens behind them, suddenly, and Lou ends up having to actually inhale some of this vanilla shit herself when Amita insists the vape pen isn’t hers. Lou goes along with it, out of professional courtesy and, possibly, friendship. She can respect that you’re never too old to lie to your mother

-

Debbie has one year left until she will be paroled. Everything else is in place, and now it’s time for her to come to her senses, so to speak. She makes some comments about possibly finding religion, but the way that she talks about hymns and rosaries with no context makes Lou advise against it. The one thing she won’t change her mind on is appearing to cut off her old criminal connections.

Lou has never been charged with anything or even officially questioned, but she’s guilty by association. Debbie lays out her plans for them to have their fight for the cameras, and there’s no irony in her tone to acknowledge the part she took in Lou’s criminal reputation. Lou is willing to believe that Debbie understands parole better than she does, but there’s something about the way she’s explaining all of this that makes her suspicious. An instinct, without a particular direction. 

Debbie waits in Lou’s silence for a moment, but not long. There’s always a chance they will be interrupted. “Lou,” she says, but not like she’s trying to push her along. She sounds like she’s trying to be reasonable and patient for Lou’s sake and Lou’s suspicion is truly spiking now. “Trust me, it’ll be better for you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Lou asks.

“Well, you’ve been a little risk averse, lately,” Debbie says. Still incarcerated, definitely amused with herself. It’s not unlike being gaslit by the Cheshire Cat. “So, I’ve been sure to plan for all contingencies.”

“You’re willing to admit there’s a plan now,” Lou points out. “And you’re going to tell me?”

“When it’s finished,” Debbie says. It’s the sort of true statement that leaves a lot of leeway at the edges.

“Uh huh.” Lou doesn’t trust cellular technology to transmit the depths of her sarcasm, but she’ll give it a try.

Debbie lets out a breath in annoyance, which is how Lou would like it. Maybe if she gets knocked off balance a bit, she’ll cut the shit. It’s not likely, but not impossible. 

“Plans can fail,” Debbie says. That is decidedly not what Lou expected. It’s not an outright admission, but even a tangential reference to the fact that she might make some mistake is enough to derail the conversation entirely. “Stop being stubborn and just let me be sure about this, will you?”

As admissions of concern go, it’s both aggravating and deeply hypocritical. Casting Lou as the stubborn one, honestly. But Lou sighs, because she is fucking charmed after all, damn it. She agrees. She shows up to visit Debbie on the agreed date, gives her lines, and leaves in a huff. 

And then, it’s just more waiting. One year to go.

-

Lou had only met Danny Ocean a handful of times, mostly in the middle of some arch bickering with Debbie. He had the confidence of, well, a confidence artist and a reasonably attractive white man. It was a lot to deal with from one person. He looked like the kind of man who made extended speeches about how particular games, like poker, could be applied to life and predict human behavior. He was smart enough that he had never tried that on Lou, or hit on her, and for that she was willing to consider him tolerable. For Debbie.

The only time she remembers asking Debbie about him, she’d said something along the lines of how it must’ve been a real experience, growing up in a house with two of them.

“My brother and I are nothing alike,” Debbie had said, without a trace of self-awareness in her voice. When this made Lou laugh, she had insisted, “Danny gambles. I plan.”

“Oh sure, nothing alike,” Lou had said, deeply patronizing.

Debbie had been a little preoccupied in judgmentally staring out the widow to notice. She and Danny each claimed they were the older sibling without blinking an eye, but it was moments like this that made Lou believe her claim over his. “Every time he says it’s not a problem to rely so much on improvisation, Mom rolls in her grave. We’re thieves, not _jazz musicians_.”

When the news comes to her that Danny Ocean is dead, that’s all she can think about. How no matter how you spend your life, there just comes a point when the music stops. Unavoidable. 

Her next though is of Debbie and how she can’t just let her find out in prison, alone. It’s not exactly easy to contact her, though. Debbie would be furious with her for showing up in person, and it’s not like she has a number to call. Whatever phone Debbie uses has a blocked number. The last year, they’ve mostly been communicating through letters – still coded, even though it’s doubly unnecessary now that the smuggling operation has been running smoothly for years. In fact, her letters have started to resemble actual letters. A paragraph here or there about how much Debbie misses seafood and decent hot sauce, or questions about if Lou has gone to this or that tourist attraction and what she thought about it. _‘The Statue of Liberty is a scam, but Ellis Island is alright. For the history. Burn after reading._ ’ Lou had to get through all of Crime and Punishment to translate that one.

Debbie clearly doesn’t expect any answers to these letters, since she’s never given access to her secret post network, but Lou had started to think of how she might. Possibly in one of the shipments to the prison itself. Lou is looking for the details of the next, with half-formed plans to track it down, when she hears one of her burner phones go off.

“I know,” Debbie says, when she picks it up.

“I. What?” Lou is currently elbow deep in paperwork and electronics, so her mouth is a little slower than her brain.

“I know,” Debbie repeats, without inflection, “and I’m fine, so you don’t have to do whatever you were going to do.”

“Debbie,” Lou says. And what she means is, _‘I’m sorry.’_

Debbie breathes in and out over the line and Lou doesn’t try to say any more. Grief is never easy to translate for anyone, even people used to telling the truth.

“Yeah,” Debbie sighs out, finally. “His timing could have been better. He couldn’t give me two months?"

“You know the service is going to be in New York?” Lou asks. She’s not sure how Danny managed it. If, wherever he was, he’d wanted to be sure his sister might get dispensation to be at his funeral.

“What?” Debbie sounds actually shocked at that. “Oh, fuck you, Danny.” There’s a clatter as she puts the phone down, and then muffled distant sounds. Lou stays on the line and presses the heel of her hand into her forehead. She can’t tell if she’s angry with a dead man or not.

“Right.” Debbie has picked up the phone again and there’s a grim sort of wetness to her tone. “You can’t be there.”

“If that’s what you want,” Lou says.

“It’s—” Debbie lets out her breath and then sucks it back in again. “It’s still on track. Two more months. I have to go. And Lou?”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks. For,” she lets the sentence hang there, and Lou picks it up. 

“Anytime,” Lou says. She means it.

Debbie hangs up. It’s the last time they speak before she’s released.

The next week, Lou gets a letter. The envelope doesn’t even have a postmark on it.

_L,_

_My brother’s funeral was today, and I don’t know if he’s actually dead. It’s not grief or denial, it’s just how my family is. Why would he choose New York if he’s not trying to tell me something? I can’t really miss him if I’ll never actually know for sure._

_I don’t want you to ever feel that way._

_I’d say I was sorry, but I don’t think it’s enough. You shouldn’t believe me anyway. I have to do this. That’s the most honest I can be._

_I still need that line of credit._

_D_

It doesn’t say ‘burn after reading’, but perhaps she just forgot.

-

Lou gets the message that Debbie will be released in the next week or two. She can tell Debbie would like to project it to an exact date, but even she can’t perfectly plan for bureaucracy. She finds the boxes of Debbie’s shit she hadn’t been quite maudlin enough to unpack on her own, and tries to make the room she’d picked out for Debbie look a little more familiar to her. When she’s finished, it doesn’t quite look perfect, but there’s no saying how long Debbie will be here. She still doesn’t know how long this plan of Debbie’s is projected to take, or if she has any future plans after it. Part of her is annoyed that Debbie still won’t say anything about it, but it’s a very specific, familiar annoyance. A constant companion, all these years.

She runs her hands along Debbie’s clothes in the closet, which smell mainly like they had been in improper storage long enough that Lou had to get them dry cleaned and hope that Debbie won’t notice. One type of waiting is almost over, but she’s expecting to walk right into another. Debbie on a job is not interested in talking or thinking or feeling anything but the job. It’s been too long for the two of them to make assumptions or take emotional shortcuts. 

Lou’s gotten used to waiting at this point. She can be patient. First, they do this job as partners, in the business sense of the word, and then they talk. Or they don’t, Debbie refuses to change, and Lou is free to go. If she wants.

And that’s about enough of being a sad, old lesbian, so she gets dressed and heads to work. Halfway through her shift, Debbie texts her.

-

When Debbie moves in, Lou is careful to give her room a wide berth. It’s on the opposite end of the loft as Lou’s. She wants to give Debbie as much privacy as possible, after this long. And a door with a lock that she’s in control of. The first night she was out of prison, Lou could hear her get up occasionally to open the door. Then close it. Then leave it open. 

This is after she tells Lou about cornering Claude Becker with a toothbrush shiv, which Lou could not agree with more. Spooking that bastard in his own house is less than he deserves, and it’s got to be more satisfying than actual therapy. One day, maybe, she’ll show Debbie her collection of his billfolds.

Debbie takes one day to herself to disappear and, Lou assumes, prowl the city. She meets Lou for dinner and eats her body weight in smoked salmon. The fact that she’s missed the last five years of pop culture doesn’t actually affect the flow of their conversation at all. Lou honestly can’t imagine anything that would. There are few people in Lou’s life that she’s comfortable being herself with, and only one that makes her feel like she’s more than herself.

The next morning, they drink coffee in silence. Debbie may have her flaws, but at least she’s not a morning person. It’s a good half hour before either of them is willing to do more than grunt. And then, like flipping a switch, Debbie visibly goes into planning mode. She moves to stand, but Lou grabs her coffee mug. 

“Ah, ah,” Lou says. Debbie frowns down at Lou’s hand, effectively trapped by being unwilling to give up her caffeine. “First things first. If I’m doing this,” Debbie rolls her eyes at Lou still speaking about this in hypotheticals, which Lou at least partially deserves but she forges on, “I’d like to know why I wasn’t allowed to visit you for a year, given,” she gestures at the fact that they’re currently in her apartment.

Debbie sits down and Lou lets her have the coffee back. “Do you know how much parole officers are actually paid?” Typically less than the one in charge of Debbie’s case is currently making, Lou can guess from her tone of voice. “It’s easier to keep one man from noticing things than to adjust the records of an entire prison.”

That’s entirely logical, but doesn’t explain everything. “You said it was a contingency plan. For what?”

“Ah,” Debbie says, “that.” Lou can tell she’s a little annoyed at herself for being too clever and open in her previous word choice. Perhaps she had thought Lou would forget. She drinks her coffee, which is more than the time she needs to organize a story. “I was going to tell you, but it has to stay between us. For morale.”

“Are we looking for thieves or Tough Mudder participants?” Lou asks. “Because that will affect who I suggest.” 

“They’ll notice the Toussaint missing first,” Debbie says, ignoring her. “The rest of the jewels could’ve been stolen at any point they were displayed, but there’s no way the Touissant won’t be linked to the Met Gala. We’ll have plenty of people to spread the suspicion around to: waiters, security guards, journalists.” Lou snorts. “I have a reasonable idea of who might be assigned to investigate, and how to point them away from us. You’ll be assembling the best,” Lou tilts her cup in acknowledgement of that, “and so there won’t be any evidence to find on us, anyway. I know every single second of this plan; I know every version of how we get out free. I wouldn’t be running it otherwise.”

Lou is about to remind her that she doesn’t have to keep selling it quite so hard in terms of her own personal competency. That’s never been Lou’s concern. Except Debbie puts down her coffee cup with a suddenly intense look in her eye. That same contained fury that had been quickly hidden when Lou had first seen her in prison. It’s what someone who studied comparative literature might refer to as ‘foreshadowing’. Maybe if they’d had more coffee.

“But,” Debbie says, “if I did miss something. If they’re getting close, and we’re out of options, then I confess.”

“What—?” Lou nearly chokes, mind blank with shock.

“No one in this crew goes to prison because of me,” Debbie says. She speaks absolute truth into being, her calm and control returned. “I’ll be squarely visible the whole night. I’ll have means, motive and opportunity, and the rest of you will have no association with me. Open and shut case.”

Lou would like, briefly, to strangle her. “So, you’ll keep me and the rest of us out of prison but I’ll just have to watch you get sent back there? Do you actually think that’s _better_?”

Debbie adjusts her brother’s watch on her wrist. “Guess we better not fuck up then.”

-

In a classically Debbie fashion, she’s planned every second of this job to within an inch of its life. She admits that a little over three weeks is cutting it close, even for her, but she had hoped that her parole would be processed even a few days earlier. Lou believes the parole part is true, but also knows that Debbie lives for the pressure of razor thin margins. Like those survival weirdos that plot out exactly how much water or firewood they would need to survive the arctic for the week.

Lou had forgotten what it feels like to be this alive doing her work. She’ll tell anyone that asks that there’s nothing wrong with running the same con as long as she can milk a profit out of it, but there had definitely been a part of her that missed the art of a new game. She stays up late planning with Debbie and feels decades younger, like a version of herself that was still fresh from late nights at the club. A version of her that hadn’t needed that much sleep.

Waking up in the mornings is decidedly different than that version of her would have expected. Her current body is crystal clear when it insists her blasé attitude towards rest is very, very wrong. But that’s what espresso was invented for. They drink in silence, like they have countless times before. Sometimes, Lou will stretch out in her chair and her foot will accidentally nudge Debbie’s. Debbie will look up, more startled than she should be from such a small contact and Lou understands that she’s not exactly certain of what they’re doing either.

Lou is sure Debbie casting her as a nutritionist was something that brought her no small amount of joy in all the hours she spent planning this. Lou has always thought the fact that things like peanut butter need to be labeled as ‘containing peanuts’ is a sign of a declining civilization, and, of course, Debbie knows this. So here Lou is, spending afternoons studying every fad diet that’s existed in the last ten years. At night, she lists the vicissitudes in the fortune of butter versus oil over time as a tragicomedy in three acts. Debbie laughs like she used to and Lou decides she’s willing to let some of these paleo freaks live peacefully, after all.

Still, Lou hasn’t made it this far in this line of work without a sense for when something is off. Debbie is not exaggerating when she says that she has every second of the plan laid out. It’s solid, as far as Lou can tell. They’ve run sloppier jobs before, when they were younger, and Debbie had never spent a single thought for the kind of last-ditch contingency that would require her to turn herself in. Maybe it’s just prison and age that’s made her cautious, but if that’s the case then why spring directly from a crouch towards the throat of a major televised event? Why not just rob some Kay Jewelers locations to warm up, like normal people?

Debbie is not normal people. She’s more obsessively focused on being in control than any other person Lou has ever met. Lou had never doubted that after being blindsided, she would have to come back with something big. Something brilliant and truly, unbelievably, lucrative. Lou would come along for the ride regardless, but part of her knows the money doesn’t really matter. You can get money anywhere; people just leave it lying around in safes. For Debbie, though, this is about something less tangible. As much as Lou trusts that Debbie can do this, she knows that Debbie has to prove it herself. No one sets the bar higher for Debbie than Debbie.

When Lou spreads all the pieces out like that, they fit together as they should. So then, why does she feel like there’s something off? Maybe it’s just that the narrative they tell is a little too neat. A little too perfectly curated to tell Lou, specifically, that everything is fine. No need to dig further. 

She sees Claude Becker’s name on the guest list, and everything snaps into focus. 

Of course. What a fucking idiot she has been. It’s bad enough to find out she’s been stupid when it happens by accident. But, to be deliberately pushed into the position by Debbie of all people? It’s breathtaking. There is a moment she cannot honestly say if she’s angrier at herself, because honestly how can she have not gotten the message by now, or at Debbie for doing this. For always fucking doing this.

It’s probably Debbie. 

Especially when Debbie insists on lying to her face about it. Lou can’t even look at her. She stands on the bank of the East River and feels polluted with rage. She marvels at the fact that she doesn’t burst into flames.

She threatens to leave if Debbie goes through with this, and she is so close to meaning it. Debbie is not the only person on this crew, and Lou can’t forget that. Lou brought most of them here, and that makes her partially responsible. That means something to her. It used to mean something to Debbie but here she was, fully responsible, and apparently ready to risk them all for revenge. 

No, she’s ready to risk their payout but not them. The contingency plan, Lou thinks distantly, and how she had been sure to make it clear that she was willing to take the fall for her mistakes, if necessary. Not the mistakes any of them could predict, but the ones she was secretly, deliberately introducing into their lives.

“He sent me to jail,”* Debbie says, like Lou could forget. Like that’s what this is about. Claude Becker had committed the unforgivable sin of outsmarting Debbie, and for that, there wasn’t anything Debbie wouldn’t risk of herself to get him back. Who is Debbie Ocean if she can be outsmarted? “You have no idea what that’s like.”*

“Yeah, well, he’s going to do it again,”* Lou says, because it was about time Debbie understood that the world didn’t care that she had been raised to be the cleverest person in the room. Sometimes, other people are just better, or more prepared, or their star sign is coming out of fucking retrograde. Sometimes, things don’t work out. The solution is not to hold a primed grenade in your own hands, on the off chance you might be able to pass it to someone.

“Lou,” Debbie says, grabbing her arm. Lou wrenches away from her touch, somehow managing to be even angrier. If Debbie thinks she can use _that_ against her, then Lou actually will walk away. Directly into the river and never look back. But Debbie throws her hands up instantly, like she knows she’s made a mistake. “Wait, it’s not that. It’s not – look, I know you’re angry but I couldn’t think of another way.” 

“What?” Lou demands.

“Five years,” Debbie says. “Five years, and I thought about this every single day. I couldn’t figure out a way to do both things. If I don’t tell you, we do the job but this happens. Maybe you forgive me. Maybe – you don’t. So, I thought, I have to tell you. But if I tell you, you don’t do the job. If you don’t do the job, there is no job. It doesn’t work without you.”

Lou isn’t sure if Debbie is intentionally setting this up to sound like Lou’s fault, or it’s just coming out that way on instinct. “You could have asked me. You think I like that bastard? You think I don’t want to see him go down?”

Debbie goes still for long enough that it’s like Lou never spoke. Then, quietly and without inflection, she asks, “Would that have worked?”

It’s Lou’s turn to be quiet for too long. The wind blows her hair in her face, and she pushes it back. “I don’t know,” she admits, finally.

Debbie nods, like she had always known that. It wasn’t a risk she was willing to take. 

“You chose the job,” Lou says. The words feel heavy and final. She’s never been good at staying angry.

“I did,” Debbie says. She doesn’t try to soften it and part of Lou appreciates the honestly, at least. “But Lou, it’s just _this_ job. This one, only, and then – I’m done. With him, with all of it. With whatever you say. I hoped, I thought maybe,” she stops abruptly, but then pushes the rest of the sentence out, “you might forgive me, some day.”

As a speech, it’s not what Lou would call polished. She’s willing to believe that it’s not something Debbie rehearsed. That she’s willing to go back to prison but it does, genuinely, hurt her to think that she might’ve risked Lou for this.

Forgiveness is a weird thing. Lou has never had a problem with forgiving Debbie. It’s more a question of whether or not she thinks she should, in the first place. “You might consider apologizing,” she says, when no better answer comes to her.

“Saying you’re sorry doesn’t mean anything,” Debbie insists, without hesitation. “Anyone can say they’re sorry.” She shifts into a character, “Officer, I didn’t know this Mickey Mouse doll was filled with passports. I bought it at the Disney store with my allowance and I never let it out of my sight. I’m so sorry, please don’t be mad.” She shifts back to herself, frustrated.

Debbie has a point. There’s no version of her that isn’t a thief and a liar, but that’s not what Lou is angry with. She works with liars every day, herself included. That doesn’t mean that she trusts none of them. In fact, she probably trusts everyone on this team at this point, except Debbie. She doesn’t know what will fix that. The one thing she’s sure of is that it’s not getting fixed standing on this beach. And, whatever the solution might be, it won’t work if she has to tell Debbie what it is. Lou’s not here to fix Debbie. 

So, from that perspective, this is out of her hands.

“Alright.” Lou says. She turns to walk back inside.

“What, wait,” Debbie clearly didn’t expect that. She makes a sudden aborted move to reach for Lou’s arm again. Lou looks back at her, and watches the way she fights herself. Debbie is quick, there’s no way to say how many ways she can think of to twist this situation. How many things she could say to change Lou’s mind, if Lou is getting ready to leave.

She doesn’t say anything. She drops her arm back down to her side, and she waits to see what Lou is going to do.

It’s at least part of the right answer.

Lou starts walking again, in measured steps because she’s more aware of the sand under her heels when she’s not spitting mad. She waits until she’s at the edge of the beach before she says anything.

“Someone has to order food. They all eat like they’re at uni.”

Debbie stays by the river, but that’s her decision.

-

The job is still happening, the timing is still tight, and Lou is still a professional. She doesn’t have to trust Debbie to work with her. She doesn’t even have to like her, though she does. Debbie is smart, and funny, and a snob. None of that has changed. When you’ve known someone for twenty years, it’s second nature to anticipate and move around each other. That hasn’t changed either. Debbie knows that she has fucked up; Lou isn’t looking to befoul their working and living environment by dwelling on it. 

She doesn’t miss the fact that Debbie very deliberately doesn’t add anything else to the plan without including Lou. One might say that’s just the baseline anyone would expect from a partner, but sure, let Debbie tell herself she’s making an effort. Sometimes Lou looks up to find Debbie staring at her, clearly trying to figure her out. There’s no mystery here; let her look. Lou goes back to helping Amita catalogue 3D-printed jewels. 

Debbie has a superstition about not discussing what anyone is going to do with the money until it’s in hand, so they both wait until she’s gone before talking about it. Mostly, Amita is excited by the prospect that she’s had six dates in row with the same man. He mentioned that he likes French food and so she was thinking of taking them both to Paris.

“Nine Ball said she can make it look like I won a contest,” Amita explains, “but do you think it’s too soon?” Lou gets the impression she’s asked everyone this question, and is considering it from maybe one too many sides.

“Give me your phone,” she says. “I’ll just ask him.”

“What? No!” Amita snatches the phone up from the table.

“The way I see it,” Lou says, “you didn’t want me to do it because you want to be the one that asks him. Or you don’t want anyone to ask him. Whichever one you felt, there’s your answer.”

“It’s not that simple,” Amita protests, but she’s clearly considering.

“He’s a man,” Lou says. They can’t have gotten that complicated while she wasn’t looking.

“I’ll just ask Constance.” She goes back to assembling the necklace she’s working on. If her eyes dart to her phone a little more often, that’s her business. 

“You do that,” Lou says, withholding her judgment. Mostly. Amita deserves to be happy, however she gets there. 

“What are you going to do?” Amita asks, and then has to ask it again because Lou isn’t paying attention.

“I’m going to California,” Lou says. She marks down the last ‘emerald’ into their log, next to Debbie’s note predicting that they’ll be finished printing by 6:00. It’s currently 5:45. “I’ll bike up Big Sur, take some selfies for my Insta.” 

“You don’t have an – wait, that’s it?” Amita pushes her magnification lenses up her forehead to look more closely at Lou. “But you could’ve done that before.

Lou shrugs. “The money isn’t what I was waiting for.”

-

In the three weeks after the Met Gala, Lou steadily shrugs New York City out of her life. She’s not deciding to never come back, but it won’t be anytime soon and she doesn’t want to leave a mess behind her this time. She quits her job at the club, and finds that girl with the masters in design and gives her Marian’s information. A decent grasp of photoshop is a very widely applicable skill, if this girl decides to be self-employed. She gives Amita the keys to her loft and tells her she can stay as long as she wants once she gets back from Paris. Especially if she wouldn’t mind throwing out all the mail occasionally.

The loft empties out slowly, people packing up to get back to the rest of their lives. Debbie is the only one who doesn’t seem to know what to do next, and it translates into a sort of jittery spike in energy whenever the next person leaves. This answers Lou’s previous questions of whether Debbie had thought much about her future after the plan was over. She does disappear for a day after hearing Claude Becker has been convicted, returning late at night. Lou expects the cemetery eventually asked her to leave.

There’s plenty of room for them to avoid each other, but that’s not how Lou wants to say goodbye. She’s got a flight in the morning. Very early in the morning. She booked it before she remembered she didn’t have to skimp on the price. Eventually she might get used to it, but for now there’s still a part of her that refuses to spend three hundred extra dollars just to sleep in an extra hour or two. She pulls some beers out of her fridge. There’s not much else in there but priceless gems these days, thanks to her house guests. They could’ve at least left her some cheese. 

Debbie is sitting at her table, holding Danny’s watch in her hands. “You tell him about it?”

“Yeah,” Debbie says, after a beat. She takes the beer. 

“It was brilliant,” Lou says. It really had been. Running one of Debbie’s cons was like being inside of an engine and appreciating the precision of every piston. “Next time though? Don’t expect me to read up on GMOs.” Privately, she wonders how much of the bullshit she learned in the last month is going to be necessary to translate California menus. No more chemical rich sewer rat burgers for her.

Debbie looks up at ‘next time.’ “I thought you were leaving.”

“I am,” Lou says. She raises her eyebrows. “You think cell phones don’t work in California?”

“So, if I call you,” Debbie spells out like she’s expecting some trap, “you’ll pick up?”

“I’m implying that heavily, yes,” Lou says. Debbie looks confused, but Lou doesn’t see why it has to be a big deal. What’s she going to do, find another lifelong friendship when she’s one year shy of fifty? Sounds like a lot of work. No, she’ll head to California, get over some romantic notions, and then she’ll move on. “Don’t lesbians collect exes like chapstick?”

Debbie chokes a little on her beer, laughing. “I wouldn’t know.”

“Don’t quote me on it,” Lou admits. Despite her mother’s encouragement, it’s not like she’s ever been to a Pride parade or anything. For a long time, her sexuality was so tied up in the woman in front of her that it was basically a moot point. But it’s fine, they’re talking still and they can bring up the past without falling apart. She’ll move on from it. Perhaps, she thinks as her throat tightens a little, at some future date. 

“I need to pack,” she says, standing. Debbie lets her go. 

They don’t see each other again in the morning, but there’s a copy of The Importance of Being Earnest left by the door. The note on top of it reads _‘Safe flight.’_

-

Lou flies into San Francisco and rides out the same day. She’s heading south towards winding roads cut out of the mountains, the kind that she has to focus on completely. The point is to have no plan, no destination. Some people might insist on obsessively locating ‘hidden gems’ along the route, like they’re gamifying a vacation. They will do endless, exasperating research to compare every restaurant along the way to find the best fish tacos for dinner. The best coffee for breakfast. That’s not really Lou’s style. She has always preferred the freedom to go at her own pace, stopping and going as she likes. 

It really hits her, as she’s eating lunch at Monterey Bay, that she currently has enough money to keep going indefinitely. Or find somewhere to stop indefinitely. The world starts to feel a little too open, her options a little too infinite, and so she looks out at the Pacific until she calms down. Occasional existentialism is probably good to keep her humble, but she’s a little busy with the much more mundane turmoil of heartache. One emotional crisis at a time.

She gets back on the road. Two days of this, and she’s starting to think about going higher up into the mountains. Maybe the elevation changes will keep her mind occupied a little longer. Of course, there’s no way of knowing if any of the passes are still snowed in without deciding which pass she is going to take and acquiescing to looking something up about it. Perhaps she’ll get a map, at some point, as a compromise. Currently, she’s waiting out her morning haze while sitting in one of the chairs she dragged from her motel down towards the edge of the sand. The world can wait.

There’s a woman walking up from the beach. She’s wearing a black turtleneck. In New York, it signifies a sort of arty sophistication. In California, it screams tech startup. The kind that show up in the news after losing millions of investor dollars. She might want to look into how to short stock soon, depending on how this conversation goes

Debbie arrives and pulls a camping chair off her shoulder. She sets it up beside Lou and asks, “Is this seat taken?” 

“Depends,” Lou says. She’s deciding if she wants to down the shitty motel sludge she is currently drinking before getting into this.

“I have good coffee,” Debbie says, holding up a thermos. 

Wordlessly, Lou tips her cup over onto the sand and holds it out to Debbie. When she drinks Debbie’s offering, she nods. “You can sit.”

Debbie does. She pulls out a collapsible cup and takes some of the coffee for herself. She’s had that stupid cup for years, refusing to get rid of it. It was from some girl scout thing she did. Then, of course, it had been in Lou’s loft, and Lou was the idiot who kept holding onto it. And now here she is, clearly thinking this excuses her hoarder lifestyle. It’s been a long time since Lou has seen her like this. Not exactly relaxed, that might not be physically possible, but not drawn tight enough to snap. She kicks her shoes off and buries her feet in the sand.

“How long have you been following me?” Lou asks.

“Monterey,” Debbie says. Lou had been a little distracted, but if she’s thinking about it: there had been something out of the corner of her eye at one point. Followed by the sudden appearance of a German group of tourists asking her to take their photograph. “I figured you knew. Was I not supposed to take this as an invitation?” Debbie gestures at the motel behind them. _Ocean View._

As if everything that makes a cheesy reference to the Pacific had something to do with her. Lou rolls her eyes. “I’m surprised you managed to get your ego onto the airplane.”

“I flew Southwest,” Debbie says. “Two free checked bags.” Lou snorts something like acknowledgement, something like laughter. “Plus, the carry-ons.”

“Of course,” Lou says. They sit drinking in silence a little longer, and then she asks. “So, are you here about a job?” It’s a little soon after the last one – try a lot soon after the last one – and Lou’s definitely not looking to join in on anything herself. But she’s willing to listen to the details, maybe offer some thoughts on who else Debbie could contact. It’s a service she could’ve provided over the phone, but this is Debbie. No need to bother pointing out the little details like that.

“Sort of,” Debbie says. She pushes her hair behind her ear. This is typically a sign of nervousness in normal people. In Debbie, it means either that she wants someone to see that she is nervous or, unlikely but not impossible, she is actually nervous. Lou gets the overall message and doesn’t sweat the details. Debbie doesn’t say anything else.

“This coffee is good, but it is not ‘expecting me to play some guessing game with you this early’ good,” Lou warns.

“The thing is,” Debbie says, a little rushed, “I thought of preparing something to say, but then you would think I was lying. Then I thought of not preparing something, but I thought it would seem like I don’t care enough to make an effort. Then I thought, maybe I should just lay out my whole thought process, since you enjoyed that in the past.”

“I’ve definitely been present for that in the past,” Lou says. Her chest feels oddly light, and she’s gripping her cup tighter than the styrofoam was strictly designed for.

“Right, well, then I thought ‘what do you get a woman with thirty-eight million dollars that still insists on flying coach and staying in cheap motels’?” Debbie gestures at _Ocean View_ , in a way that makes it clear she no longer considers it related to her in any way.

“Might be a lost cause,” Lou says. She takes the thermos and pours herself more coffee. She tells herself it’s like getting jittery on a job. The trick is to reset yourself by focusing on a movement you’re comfortable with. The kind of thing your body knows and you don’t have to think about.

“You’re telling me,” Debbie says. “Anyway, then I, well, if we’re being honest, I thought of some things I could bring up that might earn me some sympathy. 

Lou thinks of it for a moment. “Danny?”

Debbie nods. “People give a lot of leeway to the bereaved. Danny wouldn’t mind. He’d probably suggest it himself.” She doesn’t explain this like she’s proud or disgusted by it. It’s just her way of considering all options. 

“Was that what the letter was?” Lou asks. She’s been holding onto that one letter until it threatens to come apart. Her relationship with Debbie has never been without lies, big and small, but she had never doubted the truth of Debbie telling her something like that. Not until Claude Becker. She has to know that he was the exception and not the rule, or there’s no point in this conversation going anywhere.

Debbie has to think a moment. “Oh, that letter. No. I shouldn’t have sent it, but no. After his funeral I just – I wanted you to be there. I wanted neither of us to be there. It wasn’t a great day.” Lou doesn’t hesitate to reach between their chairs and take Debbie by the hand.

“This wasn’t part of the plan,” Debbie says. “Talking about him was a mistake.” She pushes the hand that Lou’s not holding against one eye and breathes. Lou gives her a minute.

“You know you still haven’t said what the plan is, right?” Lou asks, more gently than she would normally.

“Oh,” Debbie says. “This is an apology. Isn’t it obvious?” 

“No,” Lou says, because this isn’t something she wants to meet Debbie in the middle about. She wants to forgive her, she wants things to be better, but she also needs to hear the actual words.

“I’m sorry,” Debbie says. “That’s the plan: get my partner back. Make it up to her.”

Lou isn’t going to pretend that’s not a good line. It’s what she wanted to hear, after all, and Debbie wouldn’t be very good at her job if she couldn’t work that out. Lou lets herself think of it for a moment, like holding onto the first warm moments of waking from a good dream into better company. The potential of what Debbie is saying is certainly one thing, but Lou is a little too practical to let herself believe that’s all there is to think about. The thing about a plan is that intention is all well and good, but follow through is key. There’s no way to get around the fact that fixing things is difficult. It’s not just Debbie – Lou is aware of the fact that she hasn’t always been the most willing to do the kind of work it takes to make something last. She’s done difficult now, those years Debbie was in prison, and she has reasonable faith that she can weather more. But what about the days that things feel less interesting than just looking for something new. What happens when Debbie gets bored?

“Do you have a timeline on this one?” Lou asks. “For making it up to me.”

Debbie doesn’t hesitate. “I was thinking the rest of my life,” she says. She clearly came here to play dirty. Lou instinctively tightens her grip on Debbie’s hand. Debbie turns it over and laces their fingers together. “It’s legal now, you know.”

“I noticed,” Lou says, dryly, even as she struggles with the warm feeling in her chest threatening to flood her body, dull her senses. She’s not that out of the loop. Also, it’s only been true for six months back home. Of course, Debbie is probably thinking about it happening here in 2015, when she was still in prison. Or possibly even 2011, for New York. She had been with Claude Becker then.

Lou’s not really the kind of person to dwell on time that could’ve been spent differently. Sure, some things could have been better if they could have gotten their act together then, but they had been different people. Less constant, less willing. They joked about getting hitched like some people plan what they do if they win the lottery, because it would take a miracle for them to actually go through with it. 

“The way I see it,” Debbie says, “it’s something of a long con. Marriage in general, but also specifically here because it would have to be a follow up of the ‘get my partner back’ job. At first, I didn’t think it was our style, but it does have its benefits. For instance, signaling to your partner that you’re all in on something.” Debbie squeezes Lou’s hand, and Lou squeezes back. Trust Debbie to do things hopelessly out of order and still be charming. “Also, we wouldn’t have to testify against each other.” Lou is about to ask when exactly Debbie thinks they’re going to be in a position for that to matter, but then Debbie has to ruin it by adding, “You could apply for citizenship.” 

“Are you trying to upsell me, Ocean?” Lou demands. 

“Is it working?” Debbie asks, unabashed. Americans, so certain everyone wants to be in their club.

“This is some proposal,” Lou says, unimpressed. “I remember being promised a diamond.”

“Lou,” Debbie says, a little exasperated. She’s not completely immune to nerves and Lou is being a little unkind, making her wait this out. She’ll survive. “There are twenty pounds of diamonds in your fridge right now. I could have some of them FedExed here, if that’s what you want.”

“If we’re doing this,” Lou says, with familiar emphasis.

“If,” Debbie says, leaning in towards the promise of it. 

“Then, I’m not interested in your second-hand larceny, thanks.” Lou says. They’re hardly Debbie’s diamonds to offer and besides, “They’re not really my style, anyway.”

“They looked pretty good on you from where I was standing,” Debbie says. She’s grinning and her usual dry tone is threaded through with heat, interest.

“I always look good,” Lou says, because she knows what she looks like. She’s aged like a fine fucking wine. 

“You do,” Debbie says. Her eyes wander down to the open collar of Lou’s jacket, and then up again. It’s been a long time, for both of them.

Lou considers the consistent, methodical path that forgiveness ought to take. She thinks about the messy conversations that it will no doubt require. If they’re going to do this, she thinks, then what they probably should do is take their time to get themselves sorted. They should wait, and be sure.

And then she pulls Debbie over and kisses her like a daylight robbery anyway, because they’re thieves. They can cheat.

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. Literally: ‘You know what, go fuck yourself.’ Context: This would read more like 'since you're being like that, fuck off.'


End file.
